ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

Yours truly will be taking a few days off for spring break festivities that coincidentally coincide with Pi Day (3.14) and then Saint Patty's Day. If you are looking for something to do to celebrate Pi this weekend, check out the festivities at the Saint Louis Science Center. According to their website:
"The Saint Louis Science Center is planning a "Celebration of Pi" on March 14-17, 2008 in honor of the mysterious and famous number Pi (Pi = 3.14). Through this celebration, we hope to give visitors and staff the opportunity to experience mathematics in a fun and interesting environment.
A Little Pi Background...The number Pi is, fundamentally, the ratio between the...

Videos and pictures from FOSDEM are popping up all over the place. Gabrielle Pantera's talk, "Tux with Shades, Linux In Hollywood," is one of many posted in our archives and it includes cool movie clips.

The concept of world control caught my eye, but then I realized I hadn't been invited to Control the World. I did, however, get an invite to an O'Reilly webinar presented by Carla Schroder: Control a World of Computers From Your Linux PC. "In this webinar, Carla Schroder, columnist, blogger, and author of the Linux Cookbook and Linux Networking Cookbook, covers the finer points of secure remote graphical administration from your Linux PC, showing how to run graphical applications, your favorite desktop, remote helpdesk, and even control a Windows machine from Linux. It's been said that any sysadmin would benefit from Carla Schroder's know-how. This is your chance to get it...

If you didn't have the chance to run right over to New Zealand for the Girl Geek Dinners Wellington, you can read all about it and see some pics over at Brenda Wallace's coffeegeeknz blog. (I really want to get my mitts on one of those Girl Geek Dinners keyrings, too.)

Laura Scott wrote a great report about DrupalCon Boston 2008. She includes a bunch of photos of some of the women who attended and discusses the issue of their "visibility" in the open source community. Participation by women in Drupal is higher than average in the open source universe, but hasn't grown in the past year, either. Laura makes an interesting point about our education system, too: "Despite the fact that nearly every student will be working with computers in whatever field they enter, they likely will never have even one class where they study any sort of computer science or algorithm theory." She says that the leading women contributing to Drupal came...

Kristin Shoemaker posted "Flipping the Linux Switch: Linux gaming" over at Download Squad. Kristin looks at Frozen Bubble and Extreme Tux Racer and points to a page with plenty of other time wasters. It's Friday afternoon and you really deserve a break, after all. Got a Women in Open Source blog topic in mind? Email it to me at roseblog AT linuxpromagazine DOT com.

Yes, this is slightly off topic for this blog, but it caught my eye. A Miami University study indicates that girls like science and math better in the 4th grade than they do in the 8th grade. According to the study, the good news – if you can call it that – is that girls lose interest in subjects across the board and don't seem to single out math and science. But the even better news is that "as they become college students, some females regain their interest in sciences: At Miami's Oxford campus, there are more female majors than male in botany, microbiology and zoology." Got a Women in Open Source blog topic in mind? Email it to me at roseblog AT linuxpromagazine DOT com.